I received an email from Netflix yesterday advising me that they are discontinuing the $9.99/mo program I originally signed up for.  This gave me unlimited streaming and 1 DVD at a time checkout (unlimited per month, I think).

They told me they were going to split my plan into TWO plans: 1) Unlimited streaming for $7.99, and 2) Unlimited DVDs, 1 at a time for $7.99.  So, I’d be getting this neat new plan for the low low price of $15.98/mo.  Gee, thanks guys.  Obviously, they are hoping that people will ignore the email or just not care and pay the extra money every month.

In my case, I use the streaming occasionally, but rarely care about the DVDs.  In fact, dealing with the physical DVD and having to mail it back is not really a pain, but is something more to think about.

So, I logged on and changed my account to Unlimited streaming, no DVD for $7.99.  I’m now saving a whopping $2/mo 🙂

Being a good and considerate son, I emailed my Mom and told her of the rate increase.  She’s on a fixed income and surprises are not a good thing.  She doesn’t care about the streaming, so she switched her $19.99/mo plan to Unlimited DVDs, 3 at a time for $15.99.  She’s saving a whopping $4/mo 🙂

She did comment that finding the right plan was difficult on their website as they seem to try to hide the alternates under a small text link.  Shame on you, Netflix

I’m wondering if this genius rate change is working well for them.  As you can see above, at least 2 customers are paying them a total of $6 less per month.  I’m just guessing, but my assumption is that making less money was not their goal.

I drive a Toyota Prius which I purchased back in 2005.  At that time, California DMV had an incentive program for low-emissions cars.  They allowed you to purchase a carpool lane access sticker which allowed you to drive in the carpool lane by yourself.  I was just moving to the mountains, but still working in Century City, so this was very appealing to me (my commute was about 100 miles each way).  Also, the $4k tax refund was nice, I must admit.

Originally, the allocation was 85,000 stickers and I got in at the tail end of that.  6 months after I bought my car, there were no more stickers available.  The stickers were supposed to expire at the end of 2010, but the CA Assembly voted 68-4 to extend the life to July 2011.

Now that the stickers have expired, my Prius is like Superman sitting on a block of kryptonite.  It has been stripped of it’s carpool lane superpowers and is now just a moderately comfortable high-MPG car.  Mine is also high-mileage as you might guess, at over 250,000 miles on the clock.

The only stickers still valid are the white ones issued for Natural Gas (CNG), plug-in hybrids (Toyota is due to release a plug-in Prius next year), fully electric cars, and hydrogen powered vehicles.  These stickers will be valid until 2015.

The LA times had an article on this entitled “For hybrid drivers, it’s now the past lane”.

Here’s some excerpts from it and my humble thoughts…

Beginning Friday, owners of hybrid cars were kicked out of carpool lanes and forced to crawl to work with the rest of the solo drivers. Though the change is lamented by hybrid owners, some carpoolers are cheering. Transportation experts say the shift could reduce traffic in carpool lanes at a time when some of the lanes are becoming more congested.

Hogwash.  I paid attention to the carpool lanes over the last month, and they were not congested in any sense.  The only time they were is when the entire freeway was backed up, and there’s not much to be done about that, unfortunately.

Sharing those lanes has never been easy. Carpoolers have long grumbled that solo drivers should not be allowed to use lanes designed for ridesharing. One common complaint: Hybrid drivers tend to drive slower than carpoolers to maximize their fuel efficiency.

LOL, probably true.  Except for me (Mr. Leadfoot)

Some guy they interviewed said: "I figure it’s cheating like, ‘Why do they get the special pass?’”

Well, it would be cheating if it wasn’t something available to everyone.  It was, and he chose not to participate.  Not my problem.

Hybrids made up about 6% of the vehicles in Los Angeles County’s carpool lanes.

Wow, six whole percent!  Clearly that points to how congested hybrids made the carpool lanes.

Allison Yoh, associate director of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said congestion tends to be exponential, meaning that removing even a few cars can have a noticeable effect. As a result, carpoolers are likely to see smoother traffic flow.

We’d get a more noticeable effect if morons didn’t drive in the carpool lane doing 55mph with 2 miles of traffic backed up behind them.

When you are on a motorcycle, as I am from time to time, you actually get to see the culprit of these backups. You drive between lanes passing car after car until you come to the rolling roadblock with miles of empty road in front of them.  It’s tough to simply drive by them, as opposed to reaching down and slashing their tires or something.  But one can dream.

Experts have said they believe the bigger problem is simply too many cars on the road during rush hour.

Amen, brother.

Marco Ruano, chief of freeway operations for Caltrans’ District 7, which includes Los Angeles, said hybrids make up such a small percentage of the total number of cars on the freeways that their inclusion in the regular lanes is not likely to result in noticeably more congestion.

Can I get a witness? Hallelujah!

Up to 40,000 new-generation clean-running vehicles  primarily plug-in hybrids, like the new plug-in Prius will receive carpool stickers under a new program beginning in 2012. Fully electric cars and vehicles that run on compressed natural gas will also retain their rights to the carpool lane.

The old program was 85,000 hybrid stickers allocated.  Not exactly a direct replacement program.

A key reason why hybrids were kicked out of the lanes was to prevent further congestion as the new plug-in cars merged in.

Hmm – maybe. But then the hybrid cars in use now aren’t that old and in this economy I don’t see a massive flood of people wanting to upgrade their hybrid to the very latest model year.  Also, if the existing 85,000 hybrids make up 6% of the traffic, then that means there are about 1,141,667 cars using the carpool lanes.  Adding 40,000 more cars brings the hybrid user percentage to a whopping 8.6%.  Holy cow! it would be a complete parking lot!  Or… maybe it wouldn’t make really any difference at all.  I think that’s more like it.

Another quote they had: "A lot of people presumably bought the car in order to have that reward," 

A big Amen, brother.

I try to take advantage of tax deductions too.  Does that make me a bad person?

I’m not sure which is a more sad indication of advancing age… needing to take naps, or the blithe acceptance of needing to take naps.

Many people refer to complicated processes as “Rube Goldberg” devices, but a lot of folks haven’t actually seen Mr Goldberg’s cartoons.  They are admittedly a little dated these days, but still definitely a lot of fun and quite amusing.

Check out www.rubegoldberg.com and see for yourself!

I have a problem sometimes with gadgets malfunctioning and hogging CPU and memory resources.  They don’t display properly anymore either until I restart the sidebar process.

Fortunately, this is a known problem, and according to Microsoft, symptoms include: “Gadgets may appear as black squares, may appear to have vertical green lines down the center or may not appear at all and may have a blue exclamation mark next to it, or calendar gadget may display without dates”

Microsoft has released two potential fixes for this problem:

Microsoft Fix it 50617 – “This package will change the registry value for Value data in the Zones subkey to 0 for you”

or if that doesn’t do the trick, follow it with:

Microsoft Fix it 50618 which is designed to delete the extra (parasite) zone from the Zones subkey

According to Computerworld:

“Amazon began reporting trouble on its Service Health Dashboard about 5 a.m. Eastern today [April 21, 2011]. At 5:16 a.m., the site reported connectivity issues that were affecting its Relational Database Service, which is used to manage a relational database in the cloud, across multiple zones in the eastern U.S.”

Many customers lost hosting ability in their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which is their pay-as-you-go service, and there were also problems with EBS (Elastic Block Storage) which is the storage back-end used by EC2 services.  When EBS has problems, data volumes for various customers become unavailable causing outages.  In this case, the outages were quite lengthy.

Amazon reported that they had a networking event which caused massive re-mirroring of EBS volumes.  EBS is a “protected data service” which means that your data is mirrored on several sites so it won’t get lost if one site goes down.  When links are broken between these servers, they must be re-synchronized when the links come back up.  This is known as re-mirroring.  Normally this isn’t a problem, but when a large number of volumes all try to re-sync at the same time, it takes up too much bandwidth and causes outages because the volumes take a long time to re-sync.  So, while you don’t lose data, you loose access to it for a time.

Many customers were blindsided by this and were scrambling to find some way to get their services back on-line.  People have a tendency to forget that cloud based services run on a datacenter, just like the computers they have in-house, and are subject to the same problems and outages.  While there are a lot of high-availability features, and it’s not your in-house people who have to solve the problems and keep things running, problems can and do occur.

What’s the moral of this story?  The cloud needs to be treated appropriately like any datacenter.  Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity need to be addressed just like the computers in your company datacenter.  Putting processes out into the cloud does not absolve you from that responsibility.  Hopefully, we’ll all benefit from this “wake up” call, and plan appropriately in the future.

GO HERE to watch all Star Trek episodes online.  This is a great archive and points to video sources all over the net.  They include ST Original series, as well as Next Gen and all the spinoffs!  WARNING: Not all of this is hosted in one place.  This means that depending on the episode, it’ll come from different sources.  Some of these sources are malware sources, so be really careful!

[thanks Michael]

This looks like lots of fun!

http://ontheshelf.com/journals/proof-of-bubble-monsters/594